WEST BOUNTIFUL—City officials met with West Bountiful residents at a public meeting recently to discuss a concept proposal for a development in the southern part of the city. The property is 88.8 acres. The development, called Providence, would have a mix of town homes, condos and single family homes.

“There are two primary property owners,” said City Administrator Duane Huffman. “One property we’ll call the northern property, which is within city limits, is currently owned by Ivory Homes. It’s called Belmont. The property is 85.5 acres.”

They’ve owned it for several years now, he said. “They’ve begun developing small portions on the very eastern boundary of the property so they have I think six platted lots right now and they have another phase that they’re working on that’s already been approved.”

The proposal is for the remaining 88.8 acres, said Huffman. “It’s a mixture of owners. The LLC is called Seddie, LLC. I don’t know exactly how the ownership is broken out there, but they’re not traditional home developers.”

They’re trying to work through what is called the entitlement process and then they would work with more traditional builders to build their subdivision, he said. “They may work with Ivory, they may work with others, I don’t know.”

Ivory’s been thinking about ways to develop their property for several years now, Huffman said. “This other group they’ve had different proposals come and go over the years. It’s been a year or so since they came forward with a serious plan.”

At that point, they got in contact with Ivory and those two kind of started this concept of working on an overall approach to the two properties, he said. “So the city didn’t say ‘hey you two work together.’ They kind of came to that on their own and they came together to the city and said ‘hey, what if we work together on a master concept of all of this?’ So that’s how we got to the part where we are now.”

Why now? Why this? Why is the city even looking at this? Huffman said. “For 20 years, 30 years, 40 years this has been zoned either agricultural, low density, one acre. What’s changed? Has anything changed so much that we should be looking at something else?”

There are three major things that have changed that the city needs to take into consideration, he said. “The first is housing. There’s no question, especially where in the last 10 years the cost of land, the cost of housing, has significantly outpaced people’s incomes.”

So whereas 20 years ago, the idea of a one acre agricultural lot meant one thing, the idea of a one acre lot now means something totally different, said Huffman. “With all of the development we’ve seen in the last 10 years, none of it’s been agricultural. When we start talking about people’s ability to get a home, it becomes a real challenge.”

The second is local control, he said. “The state could take away the city’s ability to decide exactly what goes in there, and or a major portion of this property could go into another municipality which would significantly limit West Bountiful’s ability to influence what happens there.”

The final one is ownership, Huffman said. “Ownership has changed over the last 20 years and the city is eternally. We will never get out of this. We are eternally caught in between someone’s property rights and the interests of the community.”

Nobody likes the government telling them what they can do with their land, he said. “We’re all kind of OK with the government telling our neighbors what they can do with their land.”

That’s the balance that the city finds itself in, said Huffman. “We have the community interests and then we also have this idea of property ownership and property rights.”

Almost everybody’s house here used to be somebody else’s farm, he said. “It used to be somebody else’s open space and development has totally progressed because of the property owners who’ve decided to do something different with their land.”

Huffman said the city knows that traffic is a major concern that folks have in that area. “Water is always a concern, storm water and other city services like police and things like that. Those are all things that we’re very aware of.” 

This concept is not a city proposal, he said. “This is a concept worked on by the developers with some city input. It’s ultimately going to be up to them to decide how they want to move forward with it.”